DIY

We have just started the second semester of 2008 and my intended quiet and leisurely sabbatical has turned into frantic activity again – as intense as when at school with my students (miss them but not the system).

I’ve had some busy weeks lately trying out, creating and deleting databases and scripts, surfing in circles to figure out which open source tools to use to design and best integrate my new separate domains – barbaradieu.com (personal page/bio/publications, etc), beespace.net (past and ongoing personal projects + blog + wiki) and creatingripples.org (to host different projects for professional/cultural development for teachers). Being, becoming and sharing experimentation spaces. A new system and a new language. I hope I can find my focus and get something concrete online soon.

I am sure I would feel much freer without these possessions. It would be certainly much easier and practical to park them all on one or several of the Web 2.0 existing platforms online, not worry about the maintenance and link to them as I have done until now. However, I am not only fond of architecture, design, building and tinkering but also have some time on my hands and invested in some lifetime space. I love a challenge, learn by doing and would like to understand/see more clearly which tool fits best for each function, how they interact (or not) and what is necessary to bring them all together, make them work for communication and learning.

Now there is a lot of information online, forums and IRC channels – all this is very time-consuming though and I would definitely advance more quickly if I had a (some) helping hand(s) to guide me through some of the process. Rudolf Ammann, with whom I have been collaborating closely at dekita.org, initiated me in the use of many of these tools and has kept a sustained conversation for 3 years now, guiding me, giving me a number of tips, pointing to tutorials. There is a limit to what one can ask from one person though. Out of love, it’s time to set him free 🙂